Other Utopias: David Kohn Architects at the ASD Gallery
A ’space of difference’ or, to be more precise, an ‘other space’ is the idea that literally describes the concept that names David Kohn Architects’ project entry for the Arts Space of the Future competition in 2008 – Heterotopia. Both otherness and difference imply distance; subjectively from the self, collectively from culture, spatially from the mundane places of everyday life. Conceptually, the project emphasize distance by an act of removal – ‘Our proposal was conceived as a place in which to question our everyday reality, once removed from contemporary metropolitan lifestyles, where other lives could be imagined and enacted.’ Formally, the temporary withdrawal from ordinary reality implies a necessary isolation that potentially creates a productive arena for new forms of imagining life and subjectivity. Pragmatically, the project can be described roughly as an ecological self-sufficient island of cultural facilities, floating inside an idyllic engineered forest garden of large urban proportions. At once a product of the late metropolitan condition and an attempt to generate its environmental-ethical critique, Heterotopia designs a space outside, yet within – a pragmatic utopia which is already possible and contemporary of our present.
In 1967, French philosopher Michel Foucault delivered a lecture entitled ‘Des Espace Autres’ which appeared later, just before his death in 1984, in the French Journal Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité, more recently revisited as part of Documenta X’s catalogue (1997). Since then ‘Of other spaces: Heterotopias’, as it was translated, has gained certain notability inside the art circuit and critical theory forums. From the point of view of architecture, the reading is certainly appealing, if not essential. Treated in a clear and almost didactic schema, space is employed as the framework for the apprehension of history while time is defined as the constant reconfiguration of spatial ensembles. For Foucault, if theory can be produced only in relation to the irreducibility of the real, it was necessary, as early as 1967, to account for the experience of a world where different spatial configurations coexist and linear concepts of time are fragmented by the juxtaposition of diverse temporalities. Our epoch, writes Foucault, ‘takes for us the form of relations among sites’, and relation implies the communication of differences through a process of negotiation and conflict by means of spatial organization.
Heterogeneity, hybridism, mixture and diversity are not unfamiliar terms in the lexicon of ‘post-theories’, but what is particularly interesting in Foucault’s concept of heterogeneous spaces is its radical alterity. Traditionally, this idea is interpreted at least from two points of views: looking backwards to the past, through the lens of ethnography; looking towards the future through the laws of technical evolution and utopian ideologies. The third way addressed by the philosopher is to situate difference in between, i.e. in the present moment itself, by considering cohabitation of temporal-spatial singularities under the sign of simultaneity. In opposition to utopian idealized non-historical places, ‘other-spaces’ are lived sites anchored in historical reality where their absolute manifestation provides a critical mirror of the everyday. Heterotopias, in Foucault’s words, are ‘counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.’
Translations from drawings to buildings are as complicated as translations of concepts into design. Heterotopia, however, given its necessary empirical reality, contains certain material tangibility that enables its operation as a tool for design thinking. David Kohn’s project manifests a gesture towards the spatial configuration of a radical ecological (environmental and symbolic) difference that could generate and perform a critique of contemporary forms of inhabitation. The same design attitude appears less expressively and more pragmatically in the other projects present in the exhibition ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’ at the ASD Gallery. Adapted to other realities, contexts and degrees, the essence of heterotopias – a relational difference between various sites – assumes the form of very practical architectural elements: size, distance, boundaries and thresholds.
The Temporary Restaurant at the Royal Academy of Arts is based on the simple idea of creating a second layer of enclosure within a closed space, thus reducing the perceptual spectrum and enforcing the closeness of bodies. Deptford Creek Charrette dislocates the idea of Room to emulate an interior intimacy at an urban scale. Inversely, the project Stable Acre internalizes the House typology in replacement of the rooms to create a flexible margin for re-thinking the relation between interior/exterior and public/private inside a building. All of them operate by a similar tactic yet create completely different answers accordingly to the original problem.
The methodology nevertheless prevails: by negotiating the boundaries between different sizes and proximities, design acts on the regulation of levels of intimacy, openness and enclosure, or as eloquently described by Kohn himself: “the work in the exhibition juggles the distant and the near-to-hand, landscapes and details”. More than illustrations of a philosophical concept, the projects utilize ‘other-spaces’ as a potential device for interpretation and projection. Heterotopias are the already given substratum of the real and at the same time a perpetual aim pursued by design practices: the reality of the multiplicity of differences in social-spatial experiences on the one hand, and the utopian architectural drive for its material contemplation on the other.
